Written Policies for Your Small Business

Many small business clients think they are too small to have written policies. They believe that’s for the big boys; the big companies. Companies that have their own human resources department.

In reality nothing can be farther from the truth. In fact when you are first starting out, policies are critically important so that you develop uniformity in your organization.

Policies are a set of basic principals and there associated guidelines that give employees and managers direction in how you want the company to operate. These policies direct and limit the conduct of employees and managers. So for that reason it is important that you carefully craft them so that as a company you are not giving away rights that you have to lead and guide your organization.

Written company policies are a road-map for management and employees. They also ensure that everyone is working towards a common goal. They also give you guidelines for evaluating employee performance to ensure that they are working the things that you believe the company most needs to achieve.

Most often for small companies, or start-up entrepreneurs most of their policies are laid out in the employee handbook.

We provide a sample ebook employee handbook here on the website for those who sign up for our newsletter and/or blog.

In there you’ll find a standard set of policies that are illustrated with what every employer should have. It’s important not just to take a generic policy and implement it for your business because each business resides in different cities, counties and states. And local laws will apply to how you operate your business.

Further, depending upon the kind of business you have it may be controlled in some part by the professional standards of the type of work or product that you produce.

The bottom line is policies will help streamline the operation of your business and procedures which will talk about in a later blog will lay out the specific and intended behaviors for employees that work for your company.

For now, develop your written policies. And if you have a set of policies that no one has looked at in a long time, pull them out and dust them off and get them reviewed by your corporate council to make sure that there compliant with state regulations and laws.